Hauntings and Entanglements in Rereading the Early Missionary Journals of White Women in Hawai'i

• In Event: 60.073 - Women and Race in Hawai'i: Educational Enactments and New Possibilities

Abstract

This paper provides a close reading of an American missionary woman’s journal that chronicles her initial contact with Hawaiian women in the early 1800’s. The paper presents a feminist theorizing of the “politics of intimacy” to problematize the dichotomy of public and private within the project of imperial governance and colonial knowledge production (Ballantyne & Burton, 2009). I attempt to critically re-read the early accounts of this first missionary woman in Hawaii in order develop a fractual analysis (Lather, 2013) of whiteness in Hawaii that is historically contingent, complicated, and embodied. Using a (post) qualitative re-reading of a historical artifact, this paper, through a materialist approach to the data, asks how this “sense event” (MacLure, 2013) can create possibilities not yet imagined within the hauntings of whiteness that disrupt and challenge the author of this paper. Approaching the reading from a place of entanglement, posits this historical artifact as living data in which “entanglements are not intertwinings of separate entities, but rather irreducible relations of responsibility” (Barad, 2010 as quoted by St.Pierre, 2013 p. 655). How can such an approach to a historical artifact complicate patriarchal, masculinised discourses around imperialism, as racialized and gendered subjects in present day Hawai'i? How do we read these journals today in a way that allows us to recover histories productively while remaining alert to the fraught yet productive nexus of race and gender they inhabit? The larger question of this project asks if we can produce anti-colonial or anti-oppressive forms of the history of colonization, using the documents that themselves were used to justify that colonization? As Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) reminds us “The story depends upon every one of us to come into being. It needs us all, needs our remembering, understanding, and creating what we have heard together to keep on coming into being” (p. 121) in which there is no closure to the story, but rather a movement towards an understanding of race in Hawaii that is yet unthought.

Author

• Sarah Jane Twomey, University of Hawaii